I am an author, ecologist, filmmaker, and President of the Dancing Star Foundation (www.dancingstarfoundation.org) from which some of my recent non-fiction works (with Jane Gray Morrison) are available, including: Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence (Foreword by the 4th Queen of Bhutan); God's Country: The New Zealand Factor (Preface by PETA's President, Ingrid Newkirk), and Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus.
As for my fiction, recent works are available from Zorba Press (http://zorbapress.com/?page_id=90).
My most intense and sweeping novel is the 1836-page illustrated ecological epic - a work of 25 years and research in over 80 countries - The Adventures of Mr. Marigold, available in hardback and e-book.

Maine vs Thoreau: The Roxanne Quimby Question?

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Those who would argue that the U.S. Government is in our face and owns too much land, read something into the statistics that most Americans do not. There are over 2.2 billion acres in America. The Government maintains less than one-third of all that land, in addition to 19,924 square kilometers of coastline.

It breaks down, roughly, as follows: the National Park Service, 83 million acres; The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) operates 253 million acres and 700 million subservice acres of mineral lands; the U.S. Forest Service oversees 193,000,000 acres. Those are the major land stewards, and that management is expressly articulated on behalf of all Americans. Compared with certain, land-rich individuals in the world, public lands in the U.S. comprise a modest constellation of holdings.

Compare that, say, with Alaska, where over 89% of the state is owned and operated by government.

There are other important economic corollaries to consider, as well. Maine’s neighboring states of New Hampshire and Vermont have far more land managed by government than Maine, 15.83 % in New Hampshire and 8.21% in Vermont. Maine’s 1.328 million population showed a median household income in 2010 of $37,300. New Hampshire came in at $44,084, and Vermont showed an average $40,283 annual family income. Maybe that should tell us something? Though the formula (the more government lands the more income for locals) does not always work out that way. Nonetheless, above referenced Alaska yielded a per capita median home income in 2010 of $44,174, according to some estimates, recognizing that median household incomes vary by standard deviations, and in U.S. Census Reports, by one, two or three-year averages.

Nonetheless, it is not that easy to give away 70,000 acres, as Ms. Quimby – generously conveying her opinions – described in a recent phone conversation.

Michael Tobias (MT): I don’t get it. In an earlier interview you’ve remarked that “There’s enough land that we can all get what we want.” So what’s the problem?

Roxanne Quimby (RQ): “…the area that I have bought land in – forest north of Bangor – was traditionally owned by about seven owners…. now, a hundred years or so later, maybe 14 owners. It’s a very tight-knit group of industry people who own, manage and call the shots over ten million acres of land. And they have, I would politely call it, aggressively harvested those forests for the last hundred years to the point where the mills in the area have been unable to stay competitive. They were cutting old growth virgin timbers and there was a lot of money in it. Maine was built on it. A hundred years later, there isn’t enough to make a living. They’ve all fragmented…sold off rights and easements…just to stay alive. But they still have not accepted that the old paradigm isn’t working. They’re in complete denial…. We have the most aged population in the country…. I believe we have one of the highest adult obesity rates in New England. We have… oxycontin abuse… [and] Maine’s the largest net receiver of Federal funds, even though we supposedly hate the Feds…it’s a welfare state.”

MT: You’ve said that “Maine can use a rock star. So let’s elevate Thoreau….There’s a lot of wisdom there for us today.” What do you have in mind, and why Maine?

A moose in the Katahdin wilderness region.

RQ: “Let’s stake out the habitat and allow Nature to proceed at her pace. We have some large mammals that live in that habitat in need of large ecosystems. We have two endangered species, maybe more. It’s a delicate waterway, the East Branch that drains the Mount Katahdin area, some beautiful features, some of which are fragile. Twenty miles of one of the borders is shared with the 200,000-acre Baxter State Park which is preserved as forever wild. The 70,000 acres we own is backed up to Baxter, so it’s contiguous; it’s kind of nestled up under Baxter for a bigger bang for the buck. It’s also an area that Thoreau went through when he went down the East Branch and did a circle of Katahdin.”